In recent years, as computing technology and telemetry sensors have become more efficient, less costly, and more ubiquitous, there has been a proliferation of data generated by such new technology. Similar increases in data volume have been observed with other types of personal data, from social media to medical records. As data collected from individuals and their devices may become more personal and plentiful, such data may also seem to be less private, often being controlled by third parties who harvest personal data from many individuals to sell and trade this data. The third parties who control this data are thereby in a position to profit immensely, often without consideration or compensation for the individuals' privacy or control that the individuals relinquish for the sake of this monitoring. Given the control of third parties over conventional data collection, individuals rarely, if ever, have an opportunity to choose or consent to other specific third parties' access to their data.
In the current field, there are no known technologies capable of automating data processing for granting and withdrawing consent to access personal data. Some existing blockchain providers have looked into deploying other types of technical privacy overlays. For example, Enigma (enigma.co) focuses on the protection of data sets within the blockchain. As another example, Ocean Protocol is a project that aims at developing a protocol and network—a tokenized ecosystem—to incentivize sharing data and services, such as for AI-related applications. However, these existing systems each have considerable drawbacks. For example, both Enigma and Ocean Protocol need data repositories with massive storage requirements for certain use cases—these are not scalable solutions. Additionally, Enigma and Ocean Protocol must propagate data to their persistence providers before carrying out their tokenization and access control, creating a potential security vulnerability. Enigma and Ocean Protocol also both bring their own data access layers into the mix, adding further complexity over existing communication protocols. A different approach thus becomes necessary to have a scalable solution, compliant with privacy regulations, to restore control to individuals.
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